Possibilities of Innovations on the Basis of Big Knowledge are Extremely Underestimated

28 october 2015
| ac.gov.ru/en

It is in human nature to strive to look into the future. Innovations do not give rest to imagination: what will happen in 20 years in manufacturing, agriculture, trade, education, health, transport? How will it change our life? Who will benefit from innovations? In Moscow, participants of the Forum 'Open Innovations', the theme of which is designated as 'Men at crossroads of trends of the technological revolution', discuss these and other questionst.

Yuri AmmosovAdviser to Director General of the Analytical Center

'I do not share the optimism of experts in the fields like
implants, neurointerfaces and organs' transplantation,' said Yuri
Ammosov, the Adviser to the Head of the Analytical Center. 'The less
a man knows medicine, the more he admires all sorts of cyber fantasies.' The
expert even suggests a possible collapse of the 'service on demand' economic
sector, as leaders of this market subsidize the cost of labor with investor's
money, saving on requirements of the regulation and are unlikely, in his
opinion, to be able to create business models, in which the acceptable
unit economics will exist.

However, innovation capabilities based on big knowledge are extremely
undervalued, according to Mr Ammosov. 'Mathematical methods and
algorithms based on machine learning techniques make it possible to deeply
understand and predict consumer behavior, to find optimization resources, where
they are not supposed to exist, discover the hidden and concealed information
and solve many other problems. In current economic conditions, the use of big
data for the largest Russian corporations and state-owned companies, natural
monopolies and other national champions can be a matter of their future
existence. Mathematics is becoming a new business language instead of pictures,
charts and graphs - a revolution of the same magnitude as the Newton's
laws of physics and the theory of Darwin in biology.'

Mr Ammosov recognizes the even more destructive potential of robotics. 'The
potential of robots is not in mechanical parts, where most of problems have
been solved, but in software. Many robots can be much more effective not in the
metal, but in the form of expert systems and artificial intelligence,'
considers the expert. According to him, robots now perform many functions
and tasks more precisely, better and more efficiently than people, and through
the generation a large part of what is now done by people, will be done by the
robots. Robots will replace not only almost all the manual labor. Such areas as
medicine or law are also robotized much easier than it seems. 'Are we ready for
a world where only those few who can and know how to do their work better than
robots will work, and it will be easier to pay to the rest so they will not
work and will not try to? This is the reality of the middle-end of the XXI
century, and we do not have even a rough idea not only how to live in this
world, but also if it is possible at all,' sums up the expert.